The Sweet Hereafter

My youth is returning to me! “Sweet Valley High” got a before-and-after makeover (see Jenna’s post on it), Scholastic is reissuing “The Baby-Sitters Club,” and St. Martin’s just announced that they plan to publish “Sweet Valley Confidential,” which will follow the original characters from “Sweet Valley High” into adulthood. After the announcement, though, I couldn’t stop wondering&#8212and maybe it’s because Sweet Valley sounds disturbingly like a name for a nursing home&#8212whether we really want literary characters to age with us. Will Serena and Blaire make a reappearance as creaky party girls hiding gray roots and obsessed with wrinkle cream? (And would that just be “Sex and the City”?) Will we want to see our beloved sparkly vampires weathered by wear and losing their memories (putting a new spin on the title “Twilight”)?

Somehow the thought of all these glorified young characters getting old puts me in mind of the final chapters of “Lolita,” when Humbert visits Lolita (now Dolly) to find her “frankly and hugely pregnant” with a dog like a fat dolphin:

Her pale freckled cheeks were hollowed, and her bare shins and arms had lost all their tan, so that the little hairs showed. She wore a brown, sleeveless cotton dress and sloppy felt slippers.

It’s a scene of horrible and excruciating diminution, made more agonizing by the fact that Humbert sees how sordid her life is&#8212her body is&#8212but loves her anyway. Of course, this isn’t Nabokov we’re talking about. I suppose reviving the characters of our youth is more like watching an aging rock band reunite; the idea hits a note of tragedy, wafts of age and death and the passage of time and the disintegration of talents. But we buy our tickets, and we stand in line, because we still want to sing along.

(“Les Vieilles,” by Francisco de Goya”)

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